ZDNet Must Read:
Can open source police open source?
If the party in question has no deep pockets, if they are just doing a smash-and-grab on open source code, who becomes the cop? ... Continued »
July 2nd, 2009
With clouds license arguments become fog
Matt Asay makes a great point.
When you are using a cloud software licenses don’t matter much. (Picture from NASA via Visible Earth.)
This has always been true, of course. Ever since the Web was spun, users of Web services have remained blissfully ignorant of disputes over software licenses. Licenses, we don’t need no steenkin’ licenses.
What is changing today is simply the balance of where client computing takes place. Power and responsibility are moving to what used to be called the server side.
Things I used to do on my PC, like get my mail and manage my calendar, are now done online. What matters is no longer who controls my software but who controls my data.
To Matt, this becomes a question of “data-driven lock-in,” with Google becoming Microsoft due to its “control” of my data.
But do they really control my mail? That’s not the deal implicit in the transaction. Just as with Google Health, I own my mail and my list of appointments.
What Google owns is not the data, but data about the data. They know I’m on those pages, and they have the right to sell ads against those page views. They can aggregate data about my use of the resource, both to manage it and to sell billboards alongside it.
You can argue it’s better than the deal you get here. When you post a TalkBack, that legally becomes the property of ZDNet.
This is not because ZDNet is greedier than Google. It’s convenience. Managing hundreds of licenses to the hundreds of comments on my controversial Steve Jobs post would drive everyone crazy. But it’s easy, once you aggregate all your mail in your inbox, to give you control.
What we’re entering, in license terms, is not a cloud era but a fog era. Clouds and fog are the same thing. The difference between them is in the eye of the beholder. If you can see clearly licenses and their terms are in the far distance. If you can’t, then you need a legal guide.
July 1st, 2009
Is the GPL losing its grip?
In the latest Black Duck analysis of open source licensing trends, it appears on the surface that the GPL has lost significant market share.
That is, until you look inside the numbers.
Versions of the GPL are currently being used by 65% of all projects, down from about 70% a year ago, with V3 licensing now on track to become the fourth most-widely used license by the end of the year.
The only non-GPL licenses to attract significant usage are the Artistic License and the standard BSD. But the GPV v3 should, at its present rate of growth, pass the latter in share within six months, the report says. Over half of all projects are still licensed under GPL v2.
The Artistic License, originally credited to Larry Wall, is the only open source license to have gone through a successful court challenge, specifically that of Jacobsen v. Katzer, where a district court is still considering an SFLC request for injunctive relief.
The best-known project under the Artistic License is Perl, but that project is dual-licensed under the GPL. There are also multiple versions of the Artistic License — Version 1.0, Version 2.0, and clarified. The Black Duck project did not break them out.
Black Duck’s analysis of its own figures, however, is that “open core” licensing is on the rise and that open source licensing is becoming more diverse, less “restrictive.”
So is the GPL losing its grip as the dominant open source license? I don’t think so but I can be persuaded.
June 30th, 2009
Firefox 3.5 released, more than 1.1M downloads already
Mozilla claims one million copies of Firefox 3.5 have been downloaded during its first day of release.
During the browser team’s weekly meeting today that began at 2:00 pm EST, developers reported the crossing of the one million download milestone. By the end of the meeting, the number of donwloads reached 1.1 million, according to developers on the call.
Firefox 3.5 was officially made available Tuesday, meeting the planned milestone that was announced last week. It is a major release for the openundefined source browser team. Developers initially planned a minor 3.6 update late last year but opted to do a more significant upgrade following the release of Google’s open source Chrome browser after Firefox 3.0 hit the streets in June of 2008.
During the meeting, leaders acknowledged that there are a few bugs still being worked on that will be resolved in a soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.5.1 update.
Here’s an except from Mozilla’s official announcement today:
Firefox 3.5 is the best performing browser Mozilla has ever released and delivers radically improved JavaScript performance, a new Private Browsing mode, native support for open video and audio, and Location Aware Browsing. The newest version of Firefox is more than two times faster than Firefox 3 and ten times faster than Firefox 2 on complex websites. With extensive under the hood work to support new technologies, Firefox 3.5 is the most powerful and complete modern browser and helps upgrade the Web experience.
June 30th, 2009
Will Stallman C# warning fall flat?
Richard Stallman (right) of the Free Software Foundation sees C# and Mono as a Microsoft conspiracy and is warning developers away from it.
Stallman’s fear is that Microsoft will use its software patents to force open source C# implementations, and applications, underground.
Any move toward bringing C#, which Microsoft developed and Mono, which Microsoft supports, into the center of the Linux community must therefore be resisted.
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn’t make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
Stallman’s problem is that this horse has left the barn. C# is both an ISO and Ecma standard. The fact it’s part of a Microsoft-developed Common Language Infrastructure is irrelevant at this point.
Microsoft can end this controversy with a press release, and a simple legal document, promising not to enforce software patent rights on the software. But how likely is that?
Loading ...June 29th, 2009
Gatekeepers of open source innovation
In a highly-recommended post on Friday, our Matt Asay asks a key question.
How do we build innovation into open source? (The picture is from Wikipedia. Guess who it is, then click to get the full post.)
Taking his title from Eric Raymond’s book, Matt suggests that the proprietary model may be the best way to go here, and suggests that open core licensing, credited to JasperSoft’s Andrew Lampitt, may be the best route forward.
The problem is that innovation demands a committed team, and an ample incentive. By making the core of a product open source, then offering the secret sauce as a proprietary addition, companies can bring in the cash needed to create such teams.
There is little doubt that many in this community are wondering where the open source innovation is coming from. Every new rumor of Firefox code is seized upon by readers anxious to find some innovation in the open source mass market.
One reason for this may be that the Firefox team has both financial commitment and incentive. The best communities are built around projects with those attributes.
But there are many other areas of open source where both attributes exist. There is enormous incentive in the mobile device market, where you can get paid for hardware with open source software embedded in it.
So why are Android and Moblin still serving us leftover Apple slices?
June 29th, 2009
Red Hat rumors sign of business as usual
The recent rumors of Oracle buying Red Hat are false, but are a good indication that business conditions are becoming normal again. (Picture from League City, Texas.)
The source of the rumor, according to our own Matt Asay, is Katherine Egbert, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. She’s trying to scare up some merger work, create some action in a slow market.
Both are healthy signs.
If brokers are fishing for merger work, it means there is capacity to do such work, and bankers have come in off the ledges they were on last fall. If action is seen as slow, that’s also good, because banking should be boring.
The substance of this particular rumor is stupid. Oracle has no need for Red Hat, since it has its own Linux business, and as Matt notes the open source buzz is in applications, not the operating system.
What we are seeing, generally, is an attempt to bring back the status quo, with highly-paid bankers and brokers controlling the economy and creating money out of paper.
That’s not happening, not because of regulation but because every recovery is different.
The next recovery will come from the work of companies like Red Hat or, more likely, from Red Hat’s customers, than from the financial services industry.
June 26th, 2009
Is the world now an open source society?
I have long argued, here and elsewhere, that open source and the Internet values on which it is based has a political dimension.
They make it possible for great changes to occur from the bottom up, organically, transparently. They enable collaboration across continents.
It has lately become fashionable to believe my spiel. The Obama election and the Iranian “Twitter” revolution seem to argue for its reality.
But the Industrial Revolution wasn’t built in a day. The same is true for the Post-Industrial Revolution.
In business, I have learned, there is a price cheaper than free. The subsidies needed to move goods through the channel argue for proprietary models and strict protection of Intellectual Property.
The same is true for politics. The Obama campaign, in computing terms, was a much more top-down affair than the Dean campaign which preceded it. The Obama people bypassed the blogs just as they did media gatekeepers. The online environment they built, in the end, was proprietary.
It’s the ability to harness trends which leads to success, not the trends themselves. This harnessing would seem to contradict the open source ideal. But does it?
Again, I would argue that it does not. Open source is an accelerant of change. The Internet is the rocket fuel of change. Harnessing that power, directing that rocket, these remain tasks for leadership.
The way in which leadership works changes in an open source world, but the need for it remains. Even after the open source revolution is complete we will need leaders in politics, in business, and entertainment.
The question becomes, as it was yesterday, how far are we along this path?
I tend to date such things from the standpoint of Moore’s Law. Moore published his article in 1965. The integrated circuit is the steam engine of this revolution.
That revolution was sparked by James Watt (above, by Van Breda, from Wikipedia). Watt’s revolution, like America’s, is dated from 1776. This puts Moore’s revolution, relative to that one, at about 1820 or so.
Since there is no Moore’s Law of Training, I would say this revolution has a long, long way to go. And so do the changes deriving from it. So while we are evolving toward an open source society, we’re no closer to it than Beau Brummel was to Henry Ford.
I find that comforting. Do you?
June 25th, 2009
Firefox 3.5 final prepped to ship early next week
The Mozilla team made available another release candidate of Firefox 3.5 last night.
But RC3 is of little interest. What’s most exciting is news that Firefox 3.5 will ship early next week.
That’s the pledge of the development team, which indicated its final ship plans after meeting this week.
Firefox 3.5 should be considered a major update to its predecessor, Firefox 3.0, which shipped last June.
The open source browser is faster, supports many HTML5 capabilities and offers a private browsing mode as well as open source audio/video streaming capabilities.
Initially, developers planned a .1 release but scaled up the plans after Google came out with its own open source browser, called Chrome, last year.
Looks like Firefox has little to fear — as of today. NetApplications cited Firefox’s market share at 22.5 percent, while Google’s Chrome struggles at less than two percent.
Mozilla claims that more than one million people are beta testing Firefox 3.5 at this point. Care to share your thoughts on the near final with this blogger?
June 25th, 2009
At what stage of life is the open source industry?
Every industry goes through life stages, just like people.
At what stage is open source at, now, in the middle of 2009?
Matt Asay says we’re at the growth stage. He is cheered by Red Hat’s latest earnings. So am I.
But there is another way to look at this news. Is it possible we have already reached the consolidation phase?
Industry life stages are a little like the old joke about fame. Applied to me, they would be who is Dana, get me Dana, get me someone like Dana, get me a young Dana, and who is Dana? At age 54, I admit some may be looking for a young Dana. As to Matt, I think we want more people just like him.
Applied to industries, these stages would be the industry’s birth, its entrepreneurial period, its growth, consolidation, and the maturation of the market in the few strong hands left.
Or to put it more bluntly, what’s open source, get me open source, get me anything that sounds like open source, get me the big gun in open source, and who cares about open source.
Matt says we’re at the third stage. I fear we’re at the fourth.
In a market’s growth stage there are new jobs, new start-ups, new niches, and lots of business. The industry moves through the mass market like a whirlwind and people make money, In a market’s consolidation phase, the leaders are identified and the rest of the herd is culled.
It is possible I am confusing a general recession with a market consolidation.
Open source is now a feature throughout the software industry, and it is continuing to take share away from proprietary software in niches — like enterprise applications — where it is strong.
But will open source achieve a breakthrough in the desktop and mobile markets that will lead technology out of its present recession, or will it remain tied to servers, the area where Red Hat is strongest?
That’s the question I am asking myself today, and my fear is that we are indeed consolidating. But I am often wrong and would love to hear what the market is telling you.
Is there youth in that Red Hat, as it would be if Matt were wearing it? Or is it just hiding a giant graying bald spot, as it would be if I put it on?
Loading ...June 24th, 2009
Reductive to service Puppet open source configman tools
Key founders of Puppet have incorporated and received $2 million in venture capital funding to advance the open source configuration management software project.
Reductive Labs, which has evolved from the same named consulting firm founded in 2003, will provide training, service and support for Puppet, the next generation open source infrastructure automation framework which is reportedly gaining strength and numbers of users.
Reductive has formed partnerships with Red Hat, Fedora and Canonical and has about 20 paying customers. Puppet currently supports Linux, Unix and Macintosh environments.
Puppet, which was first made available under the GPL in 2005, is a configuration management framework that enables customers to write policies about how web servers should be configured, how database servers should be configured and how mail servers should be configured,” said Andrew Shafer, chief strategy officer for Reductive Labs, which will be headquartered in Portland, Oregon. “Puppet lets you write policies, enforce them and automate them on an ongoing basis and operating system installation through patches and upgrades.”
Shafer said it’s important to have a robust policy-based configuration framework that can significantly speed up deployment of corporate servers. He noted that policy-based tools are valuable because few servers are configured in the exact same way in any corporation.
He pointed out that configuration management becomes even more critical as virtualization and cloud computing take off.
“With virtualization, your hardware headache eases but with thousands of virtual machines you’ve multiplied your configuration management complexities,” said Shafer. “People are bringing up thousands of [virtual] machines with EC2 [cloud] and configuration management complexity is further magnified. Bringing up a test infrastructure or a deployment infrastructure becomes a much easier proposition than trying to manage it in other ways.”
One senior systems engineer at Digg.com was able to rebuild 60 [virtual] machines from scratch in two hours [using Puppet] that would have taken two full days of work if done manually. “And I was largely a spectator,” said that engineer, Paul Lathrop, of Digg. “Now that’s automation.”
“And if he needed to build 600 machines, it wouldn’t have taken much longer,” because of the policy-based configuration management approach, Shafer said.
Its biggest competitor is amorphous: thousands of unique scripts system administrators write for their own environments, Shafer said. There are some model-based configuration management frameworks developed by BMC’s BladeLogic and HP’s Opsware but nothing in the open source space that compares to Puppet, Shafer said.
Reductive has no plans to commercialize the framework into a product per se and will focus exclusively on the services side of the business. Puppet 0.25 is currently in beta testing and represents a huge step forward: three times the speed in one third of the memory footprint of the current 0.24 series.
June 24th, 2009
Zoho embraces Sharepoint lock-in
Zoho, which offers Office-compatible applications as services, is now offering a version of Sharepoint, aimed at extending Microsoft’s lock-in of customers.
Last year Alfresco began offering support for the Sharepoint protocol, essentially a lock-in key. With Zoho Office for Microsoft® SharePoint® customers have a viable alternative for sharing files, under Microsoft standards, even if they’re not currently paying Microsoft server licenses.
Among the new functions Zoho is offering:
- The ability to create new documents and save them to SharePoint in MS Office formats.
- The ability to view existing documents within SharePoint using Zoho Applications.
- The power to edit existing documents with Zoho Apps and save them back to SharePoint.
- Collaborative editing capabilities based on SharePoint’s sharing permissions.
On his blog Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna pushed this, not as a way to get away from Microsoft, but to extend the embrace.
If you have already invested in Microsoft SharePoint, this add-on is a great compliment that brings in the advantages of online productivity applications to SharePoint. If you are able to access SharePoint, you’ll be able to view/edit documents without having to invest on productivity suites for every desktop in your business.
The software is priced at $3 per user per month, $2/month if you buy it on a yearly basis. The main benefit seems to be that it enables collaboration for non-Sharepoint shops working with those who have the software.
June 23rd, 2009
Intel-Nokia deal boosts open source
Whatever Nokia and Intel focus on it will be open source.
That’s the key takeaway from today’s announcement between the chipmaker and the mobile phone company to develop new devices to compete with the Apple iPhone, RIM Blackberry and Google Android.
Software development will be centered on two open source projects:
- Moblin, originally an Intel project but now run by the Linux Foundation.
- Maemo, a Nokia implementation created for an Internet tablet.
Delivery of gear will have to come fairly quickly, however, because Apple and its smartphone competitors are rapidly taking away market share from ordinary mobile phone producers like Nokia.
Basic to the concept are a touch screen, plenty of chip memory and an intuitive interface. Based on what I saw at CompuTex you can also expect to see waterproofing and (perhaps) support for WiMax, which Intel boosted heavily at the show.
Intel has been trying to gain share in the Taiwanese OEM market throughout this decade, and this year’s CompuTex was its best showing to date. But that was mainly in the area of laptops and netbooks, where it was aligned with Microsoft.
The Nokia alliance, combined with Far East manufacturing, give Intel a chance to innovate on a major player’s behalf and gain a place at the smartphone table.
But time is of the essence, because the market is ebbing away fast.
Question is, if you’re a developer, are you interested in helping them?
June 23rd, 2009
How friendly is the Movable Type fork?
Quite friendly, but also quite serious.
The right to fork is the second most-controversial aspect of the open source ideal.
Just as some people call the responsibility to share code a rip-off of intellectual property, they are liable to see forks as treason against the parent project.
But not always.
Josh Lowenson’s introduction to Melody, a fork of open source Movable Type, reads like a friendly fork. Indeed Movable Type’s Benjamin Trott has a quite-friendly introduction to the software right now on Movable Type’s home page.
One reason for Trott’s support of the Open Melody Software Group may lie in Movable Type’s own history. It did not start as open source code. It began, a decade ago, as an early competitor to Blogger and Dave Winer’s Weblogger.
Movable Type did not become open source until 2007, after WordPress had passed it by in many ways, proving the value of the open source model. In a way, Melody is Movable Type’s effort to build community following the release of its software, something most projects do the other way around.
So while relations between Movable Type and Bryne Reese, the MT community manager heading Melody, do seem cordial, there is some serious business strategy going on here.
For Movable Type to advance against WordPress, it needs this fork to succeed.
June 23rd, 2009
Can open source police open source?
The lesson I drew from CompuTex is that open source, by its nature, limits what you can do in the channel by eliminating the marketing dollars needed to do anything.
The same may also be true in terms of the law.
When the Free Software Foundation wants to go after some deep-pocketed outfit over GPL violations they can do so, knowing victory will bring cash.
But if the party in question has no deep pockets, if they’re just doing a smash-and-grab on open source code, who becomes the cop?
I’m not certain whether LiberKey, a French outfit offering a host of applications a la Portable Apps, is engaged in such a smash and grab.
John T. Haller of Portable Apps thinks they are. He says they’ve have taken his software in violation of the GPL and are not giving users access to the source, also in violation of the GPL.
The LiberKey defense, written anonymously, reads like something from the old French Taunter sketch. It reminds me of responses I got over 20 years ago from something called Mirror, which cloned the look-and-feel of a modem program called Crosstalk and even copied its version number on their Version 1.0 release.
It’s possible nothing untoward is going on. It’s also possible there are license violations here. The question is, who will investigate and who will put any violators to the legal sword? If these French types are just grabbing code and trying to stuff support cash in their pockets, they could be gone long before a legal paper reaches them.
When a proprietary code base becomes popular, its owner brings in the cash necessary to defend their position in court. This is not automatic in the open source world, which thus remains vulnerable to small time scams.
How do we stop them? Where do we find the cash to protect open source, not from the big boys, but from the small fry?
June 22nd, 2009
First release candidate of Firefox 3.5 posts Friday as expected
The Mozilla team reached a major milestone Friday by making available the first release candidate of Firefox 3.5.
As expected, version 3.5 Release Candidate 2 was released after 4 pm on June 19th.
Earlier in the week, the Firefox team released second builds of RC1 to about 800,000 existing beta testers. On Friday, RC2 became officially available for download.
Mozilla is pitching it as the fastest Firefox ever. But version 3.5 also comes equipped with many features not originally planned for the first update to Firefox 3.0, which shipped last June.
These include private browsing mode, a new TraceMoneky javascxript engine and support for the HTML5 and elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
Observers agree that the surprise release of Google’s open source browser called Chome last year altered the release plans and feature set of Firefox 3.X. And though Chome has enjoyed a nice uptick since its introduction, it appears that the first and most popular open source browser has remained strong in terms of market share and support.
According to Net Applications data for this quarter, Firefox holds more than 22 percent market share next to Microsoft Internet Explorer’s 66 percent, while Chrome has amassed just about 1.7 percent market share.
Chris Maresca, an open source consultant, said Firefox is still the preferred browser in the open source community.
“Regarding Chrome — I think the jury is still out,” Maresca said. “What makes Firefox great is the ecosystem and the community. The produce all kinds of addons, extensions and themes that allow people to make it into whatever they want. I don’t know if Google will be able to reproduce this, particularly since the most popular Firefox extensions would take away some of [Google's] business (eg. AdBlock).”
June 22nd, 2009
Creative destruction in Canada
The creative destruction fostered by the Internet and open source struck Canada hard over the weekend.
Nortel, once one of the Big Three in telecom equipment (Lucent, now part of Alcatel and Siemens were the others) is being broken up for pennies on the dollar. Its stock is now officially worthless.
The end became obvious this weekend in the $650 million sale of its CDMA wireless unit, ironically to a joint venture of Siemens and Nokia. (Their new parent is trying to reassure Nortel LTE employees with an open letter today.)
To anyone whom, like me, went to a Supercomm in the mid-1990s the fall is humbling. But it was both inevitable and necessary.
Inevitable because Nortel, like Siemens and Lucent (the Bell equipment arm before being renamed and spun-out), made most of its money on huge switches for analog phone service, mostly to a small group of carriers.
The Internet killed that business. Voice is a low-bandwidth application.
Even had Nortel seen the handwriting on the wall and moved into the data networking area dominated now by Cisco, it would have quickly faced both the Chinese giant Huawei and open source outfits like Vyatta, killing its margins.
The necessity still has fall-out in Canada’s loss of international business prestige. It reminds me a bit of what happened to Texas banking in the 1980s, when the state’s biggest banks were all sold to competitors in New York, California and North Carolina.
Back then there was a great feeling of loss, a fear the state was losing its autonomy and its economic center. Canadians may feel that way today.
But Texas came back. That’s the point. Canada is much better off nurturing entrepreneurs than trying to bail out the past.
June 22nd, 2009
Channel ambition is not a conspiracy
Dietrich H. Schmitz Dietrich T. Schmitz has posted to Groklaw a piece quoting my CompuTex coverage and claiming a dark conspiracy.
I hate to disagree, especially with someone boasting such a fine German name as Dietrich H. Schmitz Dietrich T. Schmitz(next to which Dana Blankenhorn sounds almost Irish*), but what happened at CompuTex was no conspiracy. (Note: Cut and paste, Dana. Don’t copy names from memory.)
What happened at CompuTex was channel ambition.
MSI is trying to become a brand. Microsoft’s channel support can make or break those efforts. Chairman Joseph Hsu has bet the company on a strategy of eating into HP and Dell, and Microsoft would like nothing better than to help him punish those two companies for straying from the Microsoft way.
The question is whether that is a conspiracy or sharp business elbows.
Schmitz calls it a conspiracy. Many here were enthusiastic about the possibility of the ARM chip powering Android phones and Netbooks, and saw their hopes dashed at CompuTex.
But as I noted during that show, a company gets twice as much from a PC with their brand on it as one they make for someone else. MSI needs this money to survive in a world where its Chinese partners can undercut them. The margin justifies MSI’s existence.
It is also true that Linux cannot afford a presence in the channel. It’s not how we roll. You can’t invest in retailing if your product costs nothing. There is nothing to invest. That’s why Linux and open source depend on the Internet.
A monopolistic practice occurs when two sides are offering the same deal and one side gets all the business. But in this case both sides were not offering the same deal. Microsoft offered channel support, Linux a hearty handshake and rhetoric about freedom.
There was some indication at CompuTex that Taiwanese OEMs like the rhetoric, as evidenced by the answer Li Chang gave to my own question. Given the habit of reporters there not to ask questions, and executives there not to answer them, what Mr. Li offered was a soliloquy.
But here’s the deal. There’s more to the Taiwanese market than MSI, Asus and Acer. There are literally dozens of OEMs over there looking for a taste of channel success.
What Linux needs to succeed is a way to offer more than was offered MSI.
The question is, how would you structure a deal?
* Before you send me a nastygram on the name joke, the name Blankenhorn is German, but my mom is very Irish.
June 19th, 2009
How much do desktops matter?
Do desktops matter?
Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation insists they don’t. (The picture is from Terry Jones’ wonderful “flying penguins” ad for the BBC.)
As he explained to me during CompuTex, people are more focused today on connectivity and applications.
Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop no longer gives it control over whether or not you run open source, and it is merely competitive on the new platforms of the Web and phones.
Thus, he would argue, when our own Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks, “could you switch over to being 100% open source” we may be asking the wrong question.
We’re all a lot more open source than we were, in part because we’re a lot less wedded to our desks.
This desktop still runs Windows, but most of its applications are open source — The Gimp, Open Office, Thunderbird, Google Chrome. Give me the right stick and the netbook I took to China will belong to the penguin.
Meanwhile I define my life more-and-more by online resources, less and less by what’s on my desk. What is most remarkable about my netbook is how it constantly seeks open WiFi connections. The netbook computing experience is defined by being online.
Bing may be on Windows, but does that matter? I’m writing this post on WordPress, not Linux, and I’m looking up links using Google, not Linux. When you’re online no one knows if your OS is a dog.
Much of Linux’s success has been in the fact that, in an online world, it’s invisible or, to put it another way, transparent. This transparency is a key open source value. Transparency gives Zemlin hope that phones will run open source operating systems like Moblin or Android. But will those users even know they’re running Linux?
The biggest computing job today is fitting all these pieces into a coherent computing experience. Right now people remain wedded to a device. It’s a desktop in my case, but in Japan it’s often a mobile phone, and increasingly an iPhone. For some people it’s an iPod or Kindle.
It’s obvious that the only way to achieve device unity is online. One operating system is not going to bind our futures. You may choose to live in a Windows world, but each part of that world must compete with components running something else.
So where do you live your computing life?
Loading ...June 18th, 2009
Where is the power in ebooks?
Amazon’s release of Kindle source code, coming alongside its complaints about Google Books’ legal agreement, brings up the interesting question of where the power lies in the ebook market.
Is it in the look-and-feel of the device? Is it in the content? Is it in the standard? (Picture by David Carnoy for CNET.)
While all these are important, I have another idea of where the power lies. I think it lies in connectivity.
As good as the Kindle is, as good as Google Books are, they are in the end books. They are mere digital representations of an analog product, complete with footnotes.
But an ebook can be more. It should be more, and before it becomes the standard reading interface it will be more.
I have a little demonstration of this future in my PC right now. It’s an updated version of my 2002 least-seller The Blankenhorn Effect. I have retitled it Moore’s Lore: How Better and Better gets Faster and Faster.
What gives this book its value? Hyperlinks.
Instead of footnotes, I’m checking references online, and changing those which disappeared since the first edition. Then I’m embedding the final links in the text as hyperlinks. The final product is an .odt file, but is easy to turn into a .html file, or a Kindle file, any other kind of file you want.
The key is I did not design this book for print. I designed it for electronic use. The ebook reader which is best for this book has an open interface to the Web, so readers can double-check anything with a click and start their own adventures with the content.
In editing the book, by the way, I found one of the biggest changes in the Web this decade has been Wikipedia, but not for the reason you think.
Wikipedia reduces the problem of disappearing links. The entries there have more stable paths than links to corporate Web sites, or even some news sites. This makes them handy as references.
Back to the reader. Amazon’s Kindle has limited Internet connectivity, designed for the downloading of books from the Kindle Store. I need more. I need to reach from the book outward toward the Web. And I need that capability to be as transparent as it is on this Web page.
The real power of an ebook lies in its connection to the Web. Hyperlinks give books that fourth dimension they have lacked for 600 years.
If we’re going to lose the great interface of a summer read, it should be for something that offers more than the feel of a good book can give you. Connectivity is the killer ebook app.
June 17th, 2009
Firefox 3.5 RC1 expected to be available June 19
Firefox 3.5 RC1 is now targeted for release on June 19, said one Mozilla spokeswoman.
Over the next few days, Mozilla will begin releasing Build 2 of the release candidate to about 800,000 beta testers. But the official release candidate 1 won’t be available until later in the week.
Firefox’s lead developer said “Firefox 3.5 RC1 was not yet ready for the public to download, install and run [now],” one Mozilla spokeswoman said in an email statement on Wednesday. “Mozilla targets June 19th for the public availability of Firefox 3.5 RC1.”
During Tuesday’s weekly meeting, it appeared unclear whether RC1 would be made widely available or if a soon-to-follow RC2 would be made available for final public testing. It is now clear that the public will get their hands on RC1 after all.
Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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